Command sims cut through fog of war

For a couple years now, Iraq-bound soldiers and Marines have benefited from realistic training featuring Arabic-speaking roleplayers, Hollywood special effects and "insurgents" portrayed by highly trained U.S. troops. Now their commanders can get in on the sim-Iraq action with a new digital command and control (C2) architecture at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., as I described in a recent National Defense article:

“Arguably the most important technology leveraged by deploying units are the digital Army battle command systems that provide leaders at all levels real-time situational awareness on the location of their units to squad level,” Brig. Gen. Michael Barbero, Fort Polk commander, said in an interview.

Accordingly, JRTC simulates the complex command-and-control setup that underpins operations in Iraq. Patrols sortie from simulated forward operating bases that boast tactical operations centers featuring all the same systems commanders might employ in Iraq.

The Army battle command systems are made up of several software packages, each designed for particular missions.

These include, among others:

The maneuver control system, [which] collects real-time battlefield information and displays it graphically. It interfaces with the blue-force tracking system — which plots the locations of individual vehicles on a digital map.

[And] the battle command and sustainment support system [that] processes logistical, personnel and medical information, generates near real-time reports and updates a combat service support database every three hours. It fuses data from satellites, radio frequency identification tags, interrogators and transponders to track and display the locations of vehicles and cargo.

The C2 architecture facilitates real-time command of forces in the JRTC “box.” The digital architecture enables Fort Polk training staff to pass down intelligence and orders from simulated division and joint task force headquarters. It also helps simulate operations that can’t be conducted live because of range and airspace limitations, as well as shortages of available systems such as bombers and aerial drones.

The better your training, the better your results in combat. Now if there were only a simulation for the kinds of cultural encounters that make all the difference in Iraq. Oh wait -- there is!

--David Axe

Going Hollywood

I've been meaning to plug a terrific new site, World Politics Watch, and today gives me the perfect opportunity -- a story from DefenseTech contributor David Axe, titled "Military Training Goes Hollywood."

To better prepare its troops for tough counterinsurgency warfare, the U.S. military is investing in super-realistic exercises that combine traditional live-fire training with sophisticated cultural instruction and Hollywood-style special effects that blur the lines between training and combat.

At the start of the so-called Global War on Terrorism, the military's combat training infrastructure reflected an entrenched Cold War mentality. . . .

That was then. Five years later, NTC and JRTC have transformed into high-fidelity simulations of Iraq and Afghanistan, complete with mock towns, Iraqi expatriates portraying restive natives, "insurgents" played by highly trained soldiers and sophisticated scripting and assessment that ensures U.S. troops are prepared for the latest challenges in evolving conflicts. The Marines, with a much smaller training establishment and less money, have launched their own small-scale realistic exercise while also sending units to the Army's events.

World Politics Watch, by the way, is the brainchild of Hampton Stephens, a former Inside the Air Force editor and colleague of mine who's created a unique news service covering foreign policy, national security and international affairs. Bookmark it.

-- Dan Dupont

Sim Air Control

The Army's reorganization into lighter brigade combat teams with less artillery has forced it to rely more on close air support. At the same time, close-quarters urban battles have made air support a trickier and more urgent affair than in previous conflicts. But different languages and incompatible ways of doing things have kept the Army and Air Force from working closely together.

The Joint Air-Ground Operations Group at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas aims to change that.

The group's four squadrons teach six courses for as many as 5,000 students per year. On the Army side, JAGOG instructs command staff, forward observers and fire support officers in how to talk to the Air Force and best integrate its aircraft into their operations. On the Air Force side, the group instructs ground-based and airborne controllers in the language of ground forces and methods for supporting them from the air.

One of the neato tools at JAGOG's disposal is a new 360-degree dome simulator (see pic) that drops student forward air controllers into an Iraq-esque scenario featuring tough moving targets and itchy Air Force jet jockeys looping overhead. The controller must spot the target and talk in attacking pilots.

Right now the sim is at the Air Force lab in Mesa, Arizona. But soon it should make its way to Nellis and daily use by JAGOG trainers. Where can I buy a ticket?

--David Axe

Sim Victory in Sim Iraq

Ft. Irwin, California -- It's 110 degrees here on the southern edge of Death Valley when Alpha Company storms Medina Jabal. On July 27, twelve days into their two-week exercise at the National Training Center, the Soldiers of Alpha Company are resigned to the heat, if not accustomed to it. After just a few minutes exposed to the blazing sun, sweat soaks their gray and tan combat uniforms and leaves salty white deposits on their 25-pound armor vests. They drink water religiously and, whenever there's a lull in operations, seek the nearest shade.

Alpha's tribulations at NTC are shared by all the 10 5,000-soldier brigades annually that train here before deploying to Iraq. Their trials are part of a accelerating trend across the U.S. military services of providing ultra-realistic training to its troops.

For Alpha, right now there's no time for rest. The commander of the 2nd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade, Col. Jeffrey Bannister, has ordered Alpha -- from the 1st battalion of the 9th Infantry -- to secure Medina Jabal in advance of his July 28 meeting with the regional governor. All over the Rhode Island-size desert range, 2nd Brigade units are engaged in mock combat with "insurgents" from the resident 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, but the most important fight is here at this tiny, shambling village of concrete and plywood buildings. Victory in this simulated Iraq, just like in the real Iraq, hinges on hearts and minds. If Bannister is going to win over the local populace, it's going to happen here when he stands up with the governor (portrayed by a Kurdish Iraqi national) and promises a better future for the residents of Medina Jabal (played by Iraqi nationals and local actors).

But the insurgents know that, and they will focus all their efforts on wrecking Bannister's carefully orchestrated event. Down at the 11th ACR's operations center in the heart of Ft. Irwin, staff officers plot 2nd Brigade's movements on a map and consider their options. With Alpha moving into Medina Jabal, it's going to be hard to slip in fighters. Someone proposes an Improvised Explosive Device smuggled in a truck. Another pitches mortar barrages. Snipers are an option too. And if Alpha interdicts all these efforts, then the 11th ACR -- the so-called "Opposing Force," or Opfor -- can send teams to harass the brigade's Forward Operating Bases, including its vulnerable helicopter base at FOB Miami, in an effort to draw Bannister's attention away from Medina Jabal.

But Alpha seems to know exactly what the Opfor is up to.

Read the exciting conclusion at Military.com. And check out my NTC photo-essay at Flickr.

--David Axe

Ooo-rah, MySpace!

AP: "Teens looking to hook up with a friend on the popular web community MySpace may bump into an unexpected buddy: the U.S. Marine Corps."

So far, over 12,000 web surfers have signed on as friends of the Corps in response to the latest military recruiting tactic...

The Marine Corps MySpace profile... featur[es] streaming video of barking drill sergeants, fresh recruits enduring boot camp and Marines storming beaches...

So far over 430 people have asked to contact a Marine recruiter through the site in the five months since the page went up, including some 170 who are considered "leads" or prospective Marine recruits.

Teaching the Army

The small organization tasked with making sure the Army learns from its experiences is growing to keep up with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Center for Army Lessons Learned, or CALL, based at Ft. Leavenworth in rural Kansas, has grown from 30 to 130 people since 2003 and has doubled the number of teams it sends out to combat zones.

"CALL captures contemporary, current, near-real-time observations, insights and lessons from the Global War on Terror," says Col. Larry Saul, a Vietnam veteran and CALL director.

CALL's collection "mechanism", Saul says, is threefold:

* It has eight deployed liaison officers serving six-month tours that report back lessons from the front: two in Afghanistan and six in Iraq. Saul says he's looking to add another two to Iraq as well as two to Kuwait.

* Collections and Analysis Teams consisting of as many as a dozen officers deploy for six weeks to study particular problems -- "say, Improvised Explosive Devices or aviation operations or management of a command post," Saul says. CALL can support four teams at a time and is budgeted for around 20 deployments per year.

* Finally, Army units send their After-Action Reports to CALL for analysis and dissemination, "particularly after a significant operation," Saul says.

"After collection, initially we do a hasty analysis looking at those things that might provide solutions to a life-threatening situation, looking for a gold nugget. Then we develop and determine the best proactice [to address the problem]. Later on, we do a more deliberate analysis of the problem."

Read more at Military.com. And visit my Flickr to see pics of one Army organization that relies heavily on CALL: The Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana.

-- David Axe

The Fort Polk Road Show

Realistic training for Iraq-bound units is in high demand these days. And despite the proliferation of high-fidelity simulations -- at Fort Polk's Army Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Irwin's Army National Training Center and the Marine Corps' Mojave Viper at Twentynine Palms -- there still isn't enough capacity to train up all of the approximately 20 combat brigades at a time that deploy to Iraq.

So the bigwigs at Fort Polk have come up with a plan to take JRTC on the road. The idea is to package up the basic elements of JRTC's Iraq sim, including pyrotechnics experts, combat-vet observer-controllers, an opposing force trained in insurgent tactics and some of the simulation gear (including the new-generation MILES II laser-tag) and deploy it to brigades' home stations, where the JRTC "road show" will take over some local training ranges and run a compressed, bare-bones pre-deployment exercise.

It won't be cheap, considering that Fort Polk JRTC rotations cost around $10 million apiece and don't include the Road Show's transportation costs. But, as JRTC spokesman Maj. Eric Baus says, "What cost is too much" when it comes to preparing troops for Iraq?

Right now the JRTC Road Show is just an idea. But with the military training community better resourced and more motivated than ever after three years of war, expect it to become a reality very soon.

See my Flickr for JRTC pics. Read more at Military.com and The Washington Times. And check out my graphic novel WAR FIX.

--David Axe

Cat Food Boxes = Army Training Ground

Forget all those high-end computer graphics and mock Arab villages, writes Michael Peck in Training & Simulation Journal. One Army-funded researcher is using cat-food boxes and toy soldiers to test out how troops interact with military robots.

The project began in 2004 when the Army requested a study of human-robot interactions using multiple robots and multiple operators, said Florian Jentsch, director of UCF’s Team Performance Laboratory. The goal was to test factors such as the number of UGVs [unmanned ground vehicles] that an operator could control.

Although computer simulations are fashionable in the defense world, Jentsch realized that miniature vehicles and mock terrain had their advantages. For one, while a computer game might not be pricey, modifying it to test UGVs would costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. For another, adding civilian vehicles to computer simulations can be complicated. "But I can buy a 1/32-scale tractor-trailer for 12 bucks," Jentsch said.

Computer games also suffer from problems simulating physics; vehicles can often drive straight through buildings without a scratch or bounce off a virtual wall...

Using an initial $87,000 grant from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Jentsch’s team created a roughly 1/35th-scale Iraqi city. The scale military operations on urban terrain (MOUT) facility measures 26 feet by 30 feet, with most buildings about a foot high. It represents a 14-acre section of city divided into four areas: one with high-rise buildings, another with a market, a third representing a residential area, and a city perimeter with palm groves and open desert.

"Through the clever use of visual obstructions, such as walls, palm groves and building facades, we can create linear run distances of more than [simulated] 4.8 kilometers in length, without the vehicle having to traverse the same spot or see the same location twice," Jentsch said.

The initial setup took about six months and cost about $5,000 for cameras, transmitters, toy soldiers, miniature ferns and pipe cleaners to be transformed into palm trees. Buildings were made from cat food boxes.

Simulating Sheiks

"Salaam alaikum," the tall Army captain says as he ducks into the Iraqi sheik's warm, dimly-lit living room.

Peace to you.

"Wa alaikum salaam," the sheik responds.

The captain's escorts and the sheik's bodyguards and advisors all exchange terse nods. Everyone sits on cushions around a low table. At the sheik's insistence, the soldiers remove their body armor. Tea is served. Through his interpreter, the captain makes some small talk before gettting down to business.

"I'm sorry we had to meet under these circumstances," he says.

The sheik frowns. He's sorry, too.

Yesterday, the captain's soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division accidentally injured some of the sheik's people during a firefight with insurgents. The captain has come to make amends. If the U.S. Army is going to secure this town, it will need the sheik's cooperation.

This is a scenario that plays out every day in occupied Iraq. But this meeting between Capt. Robert Nevins and the sheik is taking place in a brand-new facility in Louisiana. The sheik is an Iraqi expatriate employed by Cubic, a firm that provides simulations to the U.S. military. In the corner of the room, an expert in Iraqi culture observes the meeting and takes notes. Later, she will debrief Nevins, correcting his mistakes. In just a few weeks, Nevins will be in Iraq doing this sort of thing for real.

Welcome to Engagement University, part of the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk. Here, the Army prepares its officers for the delicate cultural interactions that are critical to success in Iraq. Anyone who has ever accused the U.S. Army of cultural insensitivity has never been to Engagement U.

Click here to read more at Military.com. And click here to check out my JRTC pics at Flickr.

-- David Axe

P.S. -- Columbia Journalism Review has published a long profile of yours truly focused on my new book WAR FIX and my experiences in Iraq. Check it out.

What do you do?

On November 19, Marines from Kilo Co., 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines were patrolling the town of Haditha in western Iraq when a roadside bomb exploded. Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, was killed.

"Everybody agrees agrees that this was the triggering event," lawyer Paul Hackett told The Washington Post. "The question is, what happened afterward?"

The Marine Corps reported that one Marine and 15 civilians were killed in the bombing. The Post and The New York Times quote witnesses saying that only Terrazas died in the bombing, and that enraged Marines stormed several houses and killed as many as two dozen innocent Iraqi civilians in retaliation. Sen. John Warner (R-Vir.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, which is investigating the incident, insists there was no cover-up.

I don't know what happened in Haditha that day. But I do know this: the U.S. Marine Corps trains its people to respect rules of engagement and to protect innocent lives on the battlefield.

"In a counter-insurgency, you don't have a clear delineation of boundaries [between civilians and combatants], so the rules of engagement and the escalation of force a Marine needs to take ... we're emphasizing those more," Lt. Col. Tracy Tafolla, head of Marine Air-Ground Task Force Training Branch, U.S. Marine Corps Training and Education Command, told me recently. He continued:

One of our most important lessons is [regarding] cultural training. We've incorporated [cultural] training across our training continuum. Marines are receiving that all the way from the School of Infantry to service-level exercises, to the point where we have Arabic-speakers as role-players [in exercises], giving us good feedback. The role-players’ responses to the Marines and their actions -- that is something that we've tried to make sure our Marines understand. Something we as Marines don't think twice about may be an offense to people over there [in Iraq]. We try to make sure we treat Iraqis fairly and with respect. We don't want to do anything to disrespect those who might be friendly to us. You must understand who you're dealing with, what are their ways. You keep those who are friendly, friendly.

There has been no resistance to the training. As a matter of fact, the information we get back [from Marines] is good. If we're missing the mark, it’s critical that the Marines tell us what we need to do. Across the board, Marines are glad to get the training.

Maj. Gen. Keith Stalder, chief of Training and Education Command chimed in too:

How to get along with the civilian population is at the core of [our cultural training]. Marines get enough language training to be conversational, to be polite, sensitive and in fact to operate in a more coherent way in an insurgency environment. We stress the cultural interaction. We use what we call vignettes where we challenge units to react properly given a very very challenging problem.

Consider Haditha the most challenging problem ever. You've just been blown up. Your buddy is dead. You're angry. You feel vulnerable. You have great power at the end of your trigger finger, power to lash out, punish someone -- anyone -- for the pain you've suffered.

What do you do?

What do you do?

These Haditha allegations have the potential to cause great harm to the U.S. war effort and to the U.S. Marine Corps. We should not shrug from the truth. Nor should we forget that a few bad Marines do not represent the entire Marine Corps or the entire U.S. military.

I'll be covering Haditha for Military.com. Anyone with any tips or thoughts on the subject, please email me ASAP.

--David Axe

War in Kansas!

There's a war on at the Army's Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. At CGSC, a thousand mid-grade officers from the Army, the other U.S. services and a dozens of foreign militaries study history, strategy and languages in freewheeling seminars of 16 people. And between classes, at computer stations scattered around this lush green campus, they command coalition forces in computer simulations modeled on Iraq and Afghanistan.

I profiled CGSC for Military.com's Warfighter's Forum:

“It's interesting to watch the class dynamics," says Brig. Gen. Jim Warner, the deputy commandant in charge of curriculum and faculty. "Typically, the first thing that happens is the infantry folks jump in and give a relatively direct authoritarian solution to the problem, which then broadens to include logistics and other assets. Then, typically, the sister services come in and talk about contributions everyone forgot could be played by them. The international officers are usually relatively reserved until the last few minutes, then they casually mention they've been working on this problem in their home country for 10 years ... and this is how they think we should tackle the problem.”

CGSC's joint and international approach to warfighting reflects a real-world trend and puts the school's sims years ahead of other realistic training in the U.S. military. Both the Army and Marine Corps have created elaborate simulated Iraq exercises, at Ft. Polk and Twentynine Palms respectively, but these tactical and operational exercises remain mostly stovepiped for single services. The Army keeps to their sandbox at Polk, the Marines to theirs at Twentynine Palms.

To be fair, CGSC's command-post exercises are cheaper and simpler than the sprawling kinetic tactical exercises. It's easier to bring sister-service and foreign participants into a sim that mostly involves sitting around a computer talking out problems.

And besides, the stovepiped nature of the tactical exercises reflects a battlefield reality: despite integration on the strategic and high-operational levels, at the level of companies and battalions, the U.S. services keep mostly to themselves. Marine battalions are lifted into the fight by Marine helos and get their air support from Marine jets refueled by Marine tankers. Army battalions are supported mostly by other Army assets.

But even this DIY age, the military works in a top-down fashion. Expect the jointness we see at CGSC to keep trickling down to the grunts on the ground. More on that later.

-- David Axe

P.S. -- I've inked a deal to write breaking news for Military.com. Check out the very first, on the Army deployment cycle, here.

Gunners Train with Army Game

The Army sure is getting their money's worth out of America's Army, a first-person shoot-em-up computer game developed as an innovative new military recruitment tool.

Now the Pentagon is planning to use America's Army's gaming platform as a basic skills trainer on the new Common Remotely Operated Weapons Station (CROWS). And why not? Use a video game to train troops on...well, a video game. CROWS is a system that allows soldiers to manipulate a Humvee mounted variety of medium to heavy weaponary from the relative safety of inside the vehicle. It's just one of many Pentagon solutions aimed at combating the IED and sniper threat in Iraq. And it's already popular with the troops. "The primary purpose of the CROWS is to get the gunner out of the turret where he is exposed to enemy fire and fragmentation and get him down inside the vehicle for protection," Sergeant First Class Sam Cottrell said of the new weapon station, "The CROWS system is an excellent tool. The advantages are obviously its optics, zoom and thermal capabilities."

On display at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, members of the Army Games Project boasted that CROWS will also be available in the newest version of America's Army, titled Overmatch. Players will be allowed to operate the system precisely how it was intended to be used in real-life, with a team of up to 4 soldiers using the weapon station to engaged the enemy while stationary or on the move, using daytime or thermal imaging, and employing the M-2 machine gun or MK-19 grenade launcher. True to life, gamers will even have to deploy a team member to reload the weapon ouside the vehicle.

Bad puns aside, talk about getting more bang for your buck. Not only has America's Army become a hyper-effective recruiting device, the Army is now squeezing realistic training uses out of the game as well. I don't know if the Army is working on any more two-for-one specials, but somebody should send the Air Force the memo.

-- John Noonan

Sim Iraq

There's a little piece of Iraq in the Louisiana swamps. Shambling buildings, forlorn Arabs, pesky media, insurgents and BOOM! -- even suicide bombings. At the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Ft. Polk, what was once a Vietnam War-style training ground for light infantry has, since 2001, transformed into a high-fidelity simulation of urban counter-insurgency operations.

Brigades bound for Iraq rotate through JRTC for month-long exercises. They perform pre-planned missions and react to changing circumstances. They're observed and graded every step along the way.

The detail is amazing. Actors portray everyday Iraqis and tribal leaders. Reporters from local papers fill in for the international media, filing stories that appear in newspapers published within the simulation. If the news is good, the populace stays calm. If the news is bad, you might have bombings, snipers, riots. Or the local insurgent cell might just decide to mix things up, drop a mortar on your base or assault your outposts. There's realistic pyro for everything.

And did I mention that everyone is equipped with MILES gear -- basically military-grade Laser Tag -- so that soldiers know when they've been hit or when they've accidentally gunned down a French reporter or an Iraqi baby? When somebody gets hit, the observers send him to a holding area and stick a sensor-equipped medical dummy in his place. The dummy gets evacuated and treated just like a real patient. And if the docs screw up and the dummy "dies", then the brigade personnel shop has to file the paperwork to get a replacement soldier, at which point the guy in the holding area gets to re-enter the fight.

Amazing.

Jason Hartley's blog Just Another Soldier has some great anecdotes from JRTC:

Tomorrow we go into “the box” for our final training exercise before going into combat. Here at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, the scenarios that units go through are all pretty much unwinnable. I don’t think anyone has ever beaten JRTC. But that’s kinda the point. You will lose. It’s just a matter of how long you can hold out before losing and how gracefully you lose. This, apparently, is a good way to assess the battle-readiness of the brigades that come to be given a stamp of “deployable” before going over seas. The guys that are posted here, the “Geronimo Joes” as there’s known, spend the better part of the year in the field playing the opposing force (OPFOR) for unit after unit that comes down here to be tested including the Rangers, Special Forces and all manner of bad ass. Even these elite units get their asses handed to them most the time. Geronimo Joe knows how to play the game really well. They know these training areas like the backs of their hands, their MILES laser equipment is zeroed perfectly and they know how to fight in such a way that will inflict the maximum amount of damage with the minimal amount of effort. The mission we are taking part in involves my entire brigade and is going on right now. My company will be relieving the guys that are out there now. So far a key logistical bridge has been destroyed, the Brigade Sergeant Major has been killed, three Bradley fighting vehicles have been destroyed by IEDs, two soldiers have been captured and a massive car bomb recently killed 47 soldiers. (Just so things are clear here, none of this is real, it’s all a training simulation.) My job will essentially be to keep a small town safe. This entails quite a bit of work and the way they have things scheduled, I don’t think they expect us to eat, sleep or poop for five days straight.

If all goes well, I'll be headed to Polk in June to play in JRTC. And in July I should be going to Twentynine Palms, California, to participate in Mojave Viper, the Marines' version of JRTC. Stay tuned.

P.S. -- The Brits have their own, somewhat humbler JRTC at a place called Catterick. Check out my story in The Village Voice.

Red Skies at Night, Ray Guns' Delight?

Let's say you're an Air Force bigwig. You need to decide whether to invest in some shiny new directed energy weapon. Sure, "attack at the speed of light" sounds mighty good, but will the weapon actually work under the conditions you’re interested in, or will it run into some obstacle – like, the atmosphere?

You can't just test-fire a mockup – because nothing similar exists yet, and, more importantly, because these things don't really scale very neatly. The experiences of other DE programs have got you worried.

Well, now there's a computer model to help you predict just how a high-energy laser (HEL) weapon will behave under real conditions. The High Energy Laser End-to-End Operational Simulation (HELEEOS), described in this upcoming paper, is the outcome of a multi-year, joint effort to create such a planning tool for use throughout the DOD and the military.

Why is this so important? Well, laser physics is not exactly an area in which most high-level decision-makers have a lot of technical intuition. And with all the different effects that go into the performance of a laser weapon – from those inside the laser and its companion optical systems, to the bewildering menagerie of phenomena known collectively as "atmospheric effects," to beam-target interaction effects – it's even hard for the pros to answer such a basic question as "how much range will we gain if we double the laser power?"

The potential for poor decision-making is apparent in the history of the Airborne Laser program. As long ago as 2004, a thorough (and not-unsympathetic) report by the American Physical Society concluded that the ABL’s lethal range would be so short that intercepting an ICBM launched from central Iran, for example, could only be accomplished, at best, from one small area in southwestern Turkmenistan. Yet the program still survives.

In fact, the paper tacitly admits that all is not well within the HEL weapons community, stating that one of the primary purposes of HELEEOS is "the establishment of trust among military leaders."

So, what does this computer program do? Basically, for a set of laser parameters (size, power, wavelength) and engagement geometry (distance from source to target, altitudes and velocities of source and target, and so on), HELEEOS estimates how long the laser would need to dwell on the target in order to achieve a certain probability of kill – if a kill is even possible.

But there's more – and this is where HELEEOS gets really cool. In order to model the effect of the atmosphere, the simulation taps into a massive database of worldwide climate data and into detailed models of atmospheric phenomena. This lets the user tailor the simulation of the weapon's performance to a particular location and time of year, and even to different weather conditions – so you'll know whether your new toy will work not just at Kirtland Air Force Base, but on a muggy night in Pyongyang or a dusty day in Kuwait.

(Of course, there's a catch to this: the climate data is complete only for those corners of the world where the US military has friends – so, for example, there's an inconvenient Iran-shaped blank on the map.)

Now, here's this week's $64,000 question: will this new "investment strategy tool," as the paper describes it, really close the realism-deficit in HEL planning? It might; on the other hand, it might just give any unscrupulous folks a powerful tool for figuring out just which figures they need to fudge. I've argued elsewhere that technology, however useful, will not solve the problem of insurgency warfare alone; the same can be said for the problem of poor acquisition practices.

-- Haninah Levine

Battle Ball for Sailor Training

The Navy Newstand has a quick run-down of the VirtuSphere -- a nine-foot plastic ball that sits on wheels enabling unlimited rotation in any direction. It makes virtual reality feel a whole lot more real.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is developing systems like VirtuSphere as part of a program called Virtual Technologies and Environments (VIRTE). A user, wears a wireless head-mounted display (HMD) that displays landscape, and can update continuously as the service member moves, by detecting changes in orientation. Much of the work with VIRTE focuses on the needs of the Marine Corps.

The ONR selected VirtuSphere for the VIRTE program last fall. The VirtuSphere allows the trainee to walk, run, and crawl in any direction, adding a further dimension of realism to virtual training. The ball can be disassembled, the entire kit fits in a car for transportation, and it weighs less than 500 pounds. There are a number of videos available for those with some time to kill.

Besides the military training application, there are obviously a ton of other possibilities for this product. The company is based in Redmond, Washington, so I hope that they're working with the Softies to hook this bugger up to an XBox 360. Sort of an XBox 360³.

-- Murdoc

Fake Soldier Saves Real Cash

Meet Santos. He's a simulated soldier, being developed at the University of Iowa. And he's so true-to-life, Wired News reports, that engineers are using him to test out equipment before it ever leaves the desktop.

Santos is programmed with extensive modeling data, the result of research on the human body. As he moves in response to commands, he sends back information on his comfort level and joint angles. And, if Santos has difficulty completing a task, project engineers will have the correct information to make modifications before the first stage of production begins.

When the U.S. Army needs new designs of combat-ready body armor and other protective gear, it, too, turns to digital human technology. Santos can model the new duds and advise if they are too restrictive, or if the material doesn't have enough give to be useful in the field.

In a demonstration, Santos appeared on a monitor, dressed in desert camouflage. Darkness enveloped an overturned Humvee, and Santos struggled to escape through a narrow hatch opening. After removing his vest and holster, he easily slid through to safety.

US vs. Protoss

I've been into video games since the Atari 2600. And I've played all kinds -- shooters, sports, role-players, what have you. But, for the last decade or so, my real weakness has been real-time strategy (RTS) games. Back in '98, my bandmates and I were so addicted to Starcraft, we put a Zerg hydralisk on one of our posters. Even today, my fiancee, much to her annoyance, has the catchphrases from Age of Empires III memorized, she's heard 'em so many times coming from my laptop.

But, as awesome and as challenging as these war simulations can be, they're not particularly realistic. David Wong wants to change all that. So he's developed his 20-point checklist for the "ultimate" RTS... one that'll give experienced players "Thousand-Yard Stares."

3. Every War Sim has a "Fog of War" that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown "Fog of Bullshit" layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an Aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over...

5. I want that "Public Support" meter to rise and fall according to Troops Lost, Length of Conflict, Innocents Killed and Whether or Not There is Anything Else On TV That Week. I want to lose 200 Public Support points because, in a war where 8,000 units have been lost, one of my Mutalisks happened to be caught on video accidentally eating one clergyman. Then, later, my destruction of an entire enemy city goes unnoticed because the Nude Zero-Gravity Futureball championship went into overtime....

7. I want my Mission Objectives to change every 30 seconds, without anyone letting me know. I want little talking heads to pop up on my screen - commanders, politicians, allies, military intelligence - each giving me different sets of victory parameters, all of them conflicting and many of them written in bullshit ass-covering doublespeak.

(Big ups: Kris)

Air Force Wants Space War Game

Blasting pixilated space ships can be mighty fun, as anyone who's ever played Galaga can tell you. The Air Force thinks it can put all that joystick time to good use, too -- by using games to help airmen prepare for real-life outer space combat.

The service is looking for game maker to build a sim for what it calls “counterspace operations” -- military-speak for stopping enemy satellites.

Right now, it’s hard to train folks to handle these kinds of missions. Wargaming in orbit is an expensive and risky proposition. And most – but definitely not all -- of the coolest counterspace toys are still on the drawing board. So the Air Force wants a video game “where these tasks can be trained and rehearsed in a realistic set of scenarios and simulations.”

“Access to any classified data would be eliminated” in the simulation, the Air Force says in its request for proposals (scroll down). “[B]ut the training that is provided could be conceptually valid and of sufficient fidelity to support the key [counterpsace] tasks.”

The idea of using games to train kids for a space fight has been around for years – at least since 1985’s sci-fi classic, Ender’s Game.

The U.S. armed forces have been using games to prep its troops for even longer. Back in World War II, a flight simulator in New York’s Coney Island amusement park was turned into a training tool for military pilots. Recent years have only brought the worlds of gaming and the world of war closer, as more of combat has become a matter of pushing the right buttons; and the game have grown more realistic.

Still, you’ve got to hope that this new sim won’t be too true-to-life. What’s a space game, after all, without a tractor beams and a “challenging stage?”

War (Sim) and Peace (Sim)

The Serious Games Summit in Washington, DC earlier this week was a study in contrasts -- especially when it came to military sims. On the one hand, you had the America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior folks. They're trying to figure out how computer and video games can move more into the training sphere.

Maybe the best example I came across was at the raucous America's Army reception, where they demonstrated some of the ways the game's software has been paired with the Army's hardware to try and solve extremely real problems, like convoy protection. Laser Shot, Inc. has been working with the America's Army development team on the Convoy Skills Engagement Trainer.

Here is an excerpt from a piece I did on America's Army for The World public radio program earlier this week.

On the other hand, you had a games project called Foreign Ground. Foreign Ground is being developed by the Swedish National Defense College. Sweden's decided that it "doesn't do wars anymore." Instead, it participates in UN peace-keeping missions. So, working with some Swedish universities, the College has developed Foreign Ground, a computer game that puts five UN soldiers smack-dab in the middle of Monrovia, Liberia. The mission is to go on patrol, talk to the locals, and deal with situations such as looting or angry mobs. The goal of the game is to difuse situations with as little force as possible.

-- Clark Boyd

America's Army Hits the X-Box

This is my first post here at Defense Tech. Noah was kind enough to let me play in the Defense Tech sandbox for a couple of days, because I'm down here in DC to cover the Serious Games Summit. My normal gig is as Technology Correspondent for The World, an international news program co-produced by the BBC World Service in London, and WGBH public radio in Boston.

After a long morning filled with alot of talk about the intersection of physical, informational, and cognitive worlds of gaming (somewhere in there I think I heard "inter-linked topologies," but I hadn't had much coffee yet, so...), I think I finally hit on some useful info.

America's Army, the popular first person shooter, is coming out on X-Box on November 15th. But that's not even half the story, or even the really good part of the story. The Army is working with numerous companies to expand AA, which started out as a recruitment and promotional tool, into an across-the-board training sim. We're talking something that will be with a soldier from the recruiting station, to basic training, and right on through to the streets of Baghdad and Kandahar.

This isn't just on the desktop. A stripped down Humvee, for example, can be put in what they're calling a Seamless Synthetic Training Domain, surrounded by white walls. A gunner and driver can then sit in the Humvee, while a training scene -- say it's a convoy scenario in Mosul -- plays out on 360 degrees worth of white screens. The sim records their hits and misses, the things they did right, and the things they did wrong. The soldiers wear vests that record the hits virtual baddies score on them, and the simulation adjusts accordingly. Other soldiers, linked via PC, can even play the bad guys in the scenario. All the information is recorded, and It can be fed back into the system for an After Action Review. Whoah.

More to come...

-- Clark Boyd

Less Exercise?

Friendly fire was responsible for 35 deaths in the Persian Gulf War -- 23 percent of U.S. military fatalities, a total that led the Pentagon to develop a range of "combat identification" technologies over the next decade.

The percentage of U.S. deaths attributed to friendly fire during Operation Iraqi Freedom was, of course, much lower, but there's still some work to do. Which is why the United States and eight other countries this week are wrapping up a key exercise designed in part to test the military utility of various combat ID technologies.

"Urgent Quest," as it is known, is one of more than 120 major training exercises and experiments sponsored by the U.S. military each year. But such events take troops, time and money, three things in short supply for U.S. troops these days.

No surprise, then, that the Pentagon is thinking about scaling back. As InsideDefense.com's Jason Sherman reported in September, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has asked for a look into how many of those 122 exercises are necessary.

On top of that, a special panel of Quadrennial Defense Review planners is examining the same question. And Jason has obtained internal QDR briefing charts that show reducing the number of exercises each year is in fact on the table.

All of them combined cost "only" a few hundred million dollars, though -- not enough savings to affect a looming defense budget crunch.

The real reason for wanting to cut back: With so many military personnel either deployed, preparing to deploy or recovering from a stint in Iraq or Afghanistsan, finding troops to participate in live exercises and training events can be tough.

“Please take a hard look at your areas of responsibility in each exercise with an eye toward reducing unneeded stress on the force,” Rumsfeld said in a July memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

THERE'S MORE: For a good rundown of this year's major and minor military exercises, some of which the Pentagon would rather you not know about, check out William Arkin's indispensable national security calendar. And don't forget his blog.

-- Posted by Dan Dupont

Generals' Crystal Ball?

What if there was a piece of software that could predict -- really, accurately predict -- how a war was going to go?

The Economist reports on a "collaboration between computer programmers, mathematicians, weapons experts, military historians, retired generals and combat veterans" that's been surprisingly prescient about conflicts' length and casualty counts. The catch: it doesn't work on counterinsurgencies and guerilla wars, like the one we now have in Iraq.

The Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model's predictive power is due in large part to the mountain of data on which it draws, thought to be the largest historical combat database in the world. The Dupuy Institute's researchers comb military archives worldwide, painstakingly assembling statistics which reveal cause-and-effect relationships, such as the influence of rainfall on the rate of rifle breakdowns during the Battle of the Ardennes, or the percentage of Iraqi soldiers killed in a unit before the survivors in that unit surrendered during the Gulf war.

Analysts then take a real battle or campaign and write equations linking causes (say, appropriateness of uniform camouflage) to effects (sniper kill ratios). These equations are then tested against the historical figures in the database, making it possible to identify relationships between the circumstances of an engagement and its outcome, says Chris Lawrence, the Dupuy Institute's director since its founder's death in 1995.

The TNDM's reliance on real combat data, rather than results from war games or exercises, also gives it an edge. Another forecasting system, TACWAR, was used by America's Joint Chiefs of Staff to plan the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Like many models, it was largely developed with data from war games. As a result, says Richard Anderson, a tank specialist at the Dupuy Institute, TACWAR and other programs based on “laser tag” exercises tend to “run hot”, or overestimate casualties. Real-bullet data is more reliable, because fear of death makes soldiers more conservative in actual combat than they are in exercises, resulting in fewer losses. The discipline is only just beginning to recognise the “tremendous value of real-world verification”, says Andreas Tolk, an eminent modelling scientist at Virginia's Old Dominion University.

The next challenge will be to expand the TNDM's ability to forecast the outcomes of “asymmetric” conflicts, such as the Iraqi insurgency. To this end, the Dupuy Institute is hoping to get its hands on the Vietcong archives, as Vietnam opens up. Insurgencies rarely leave much of a paper trail, but the Vietnamese kept detailed records of their struggle against the French and Americans. The resulting papers provide the world's most extensive documentation of guerrilla fighting.

(Big ups: JVD)

Death by Powerpoint

Guerilla snipers in Iraq are now polishing their craft online, with a web-based training manual.

"If you had only one shot, who should you kill?" the primer asks, leading its students through a series of grisly scenarios.

If you see a line of Soldiers, kill the one who you think is the officer. Then, shoot the communications officer, then the MG [machine–gunner] – then the doctor – if he’s there, you’ll know by the red cross on his arm – (you don’t need to respect the Geneva Treaty as long as the enemy does not respect it) and shoot at the Soldiers.

The manual was recently translated, turned in to a PowerPoint presentation, and given to Defense and the National Interest by an American government worker in Iraq.

"We posted it primarily to make it widely available to U.S. troops, including those in the U.S," the site's editor, Chet Richards says.

In that spirit, Military.com has uploaded an HTML version so folks without PowerPoint can take a look. ABC News has more.

MILITARY SIMS STEP UP

The AP's Mike Branom heads down to the Defense Department's annual training and simulation conference, and finds some pretty cool stuff.

One company's virtual street battle includes a destroyed Humvee with convincing burn marks, a lifelike squad of soldiers scurrying to the rescue and a businesslike yet bitter announcement over the radio network that the vehicle's occupants are all KIA.

Lockheed Martin's Virtual Combat Convoy Trainer, used by 3,000 soldiers since coming online this fall, used maps and photographs to accurately re-create Baghdad, Fallujah and Tikrit.

"We've heard soldiers tell us, 'This is the corner where I got shot at,'" said Dan Crowley, the company's president for simulation, training and support.

I'm quoted down at the bottom of the story, as the resident curmudgeon. But I'm really not all that grumpy -- not about this, anyway. The more soldiers can hone their skills before they hit the battlefield, the better. We just shouldn't confuse joystick mojo with experience in the real world.

GAMERS GET ARMY'S NEW DUDS

Soldiers in the field won't see the next generation of combat uniforms until 2007, at the earliest. But videogamers can check out the "Future Force Warrior" gear right now, in the latest Tom Clancy digital adventure. Players can strap on the FFW helmet, with night-vision sights, radio antennae, and bone-conducting microphones built in. They can drink out a new-fangled, "on-the-move" hydration system. And, of course, they can blast away, with the ultra-slick M29 rifle -- the one with the mounted camera, laser target designator, and grenade launcher built in. There's no word, yet, on whether gamers will be able to use FFW's extended, unisex zipper and expanded butt-flap, which allow G.I. Janes to tinkle without "literally being caught with their pants down," explains an FFW program manager.

G.I.'S GAME TO LEARN ARABIC

U.S. Special Forces have a new way of learning Arabic -- by playing a video game.

Arabic is one of those languages that are particularly hard to master in a classroom. There's a whole new alphabet to learn. A lot of the syllables seem the same to American ears. Unlike French or Spanish, there aren't a whole bunch of words in common with English. And there are a zillion dialects that sound a whole lot different from the Arabic taught in school.

The idea behind the new simulator is to give G.I.s a more realistic learning environment -- one in which they only have to learn the limited, "tactical" vocabulary they need to operate on the street.

This "Tactical Language Project" -- co-developed by the University of Southern California and Darpa, the Pentagon's mad science division -- first teaches a soldier the basics of spoken Arabic. The grunt then tries out what he's learned in a pixilated Lebanese village. Wearing a headset, the player talks to the game's Arabic-speaking characters. Using artificial intelligence and speech recognition software, these digitized Lebanese guide the G.I. through the linguistic labyrinth of their native tongue.

The game teaches nonverbal cues, too. "For example," the New York Times notes, "when [game protagonist] Sergeant Smith starts or finishes a conversation with an important person, he can cross his right hand over his heart and bow slightly, a common gesture of respect in the Arab world."

Check out footage of the game here.

WAR IS NOT A GAME

The world of video games and the world of war are drifting closer. That's not necessarily such a good thing, notes Got Game?, a new blog devoted to "the future of play."